Yesterday we released Korora 19.1 which is a 3 month update to the original 19 release. Anyone already running Korora doesn’t need this, however if you are planning do any more installs we highly recommend downloading this new release as it includes all updates, a few tweaks and fixes a number of bugs. This release also includes versions of the MATE and Cinnamon desktops which we’ve created to gauge community interest.

The 19.1 release features:

All updates at time of release, including; KDE 4.11, kernel 3.11.2 and Firefox 24

Introduces support for MATE and Cinnamon desktops

Replaces rawtherapee raw image editor with darktable

Includes lzma compression, fonts-tweak-tool and gnome-documents

Fixes a systemd bug where the installer sometimes won’t start

MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, so if you’re pining for the old days and GNOME 3 isn’t your cup of tea, this may be for you.

Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME Shell and implements a more traditional layout with modern technology on top of GNOME 3.

MATE

CINNAMON

Thank you to our community members who have helped to make this release possible.

Once installed, Korora has worked flawlessly for me. Every system, every bit of hardware, every driver — they have all worked straight out of the box. If you’re not into reading release announcements and such to find out what the differences [between Fedora and Korora] are, just install it and then browse around in the menus a bit. It includes a truly impressive array of pre-installed software, in every category. If you make the effort to try it, you are likely to love it.

Yesterday I posted how to list packages you’ve explicitly installed using yum, but some people have written in to say the command shows packages that they never explicitly installed. Some examples are, things like ModemManager and firmware packages.

I think the reason for this is that yumdb is including default and mandatory packages from when you install a group. I guess that makes sense, if you install a group then you’re telling it you want all of the packages there (but you shouldn’t get any deps).

For example, most systems probably have @hardware-support group installed, which is where ipw220-firmware comes from:$ sudo yum groupinfo hardware-support |grep ipw2200
=ipw2200-firmware

If you’re after a way to list all the packages you have explicitly installed (rather than packages that have been pulled in as a dependency) then you can do that with yumdb (thanks to Panu on #yum for the tip) which is powered by a new database added in 2009.

List packages you chose to install:yumdb search reason user

List packages which were installed as deps:yumdb search reason dep

Let’s go through an example, installing gnash which pulls in a few deps on my system:Installed:
gnash.x86_64 1:0.8.10-8.fc19

Update:
Some people have written in to say the command shows packages that they never explicitly installed, things like ModemManager and firware packages.

I think the reason for this is that yumdb is including default and mandatory packages from when you install a group. I guess that makes sense, if you install a group then you’re telling it you want all of the packages there (but you shouldn’t get any deps).

For example, most systems probably have @hardware-support group installed, which is where ipw220-firmware comes from:$ sudo yum groupinfo hardware-support |grep ipw2200
=ipw2200-firmware

The first beta release of version 19 (codename “Bruce”) is now available for download.

As I have been thoroughly tied up with full-time work and University, this release is pretty much the sole work of my fellow Korora developer and right-hand man, Ian “firnsy” Firns. A HUGE thanks to him for all his hard work in getting this release up and out, it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise!

This is the first beta release of Korora which is derived from a beta release of Fedora1 (previous beta versions of Korora were from a stable upstream release) and as such there will likely be a larger number of bugs and many software updates.

I have an (unfortunately too small) Samsung 840 Pro in my laptop and it’s been a long time since I’ve re-installed (no time for Korora for months) and I’ve noticed it getting a little sluggish. Most noticeable is long pauses while the drive goes nuts. I figured it was probably time to get some TRIM action on the drive, something I never bothered with before because I didn’t really care.

My setup is reasonably common, I imagine. I have a regular old boot partition and a second encrypted partition which is used as a physical volume for lvm. Hence any and all lv are automatically encrypted. If you’re using encryption, it’s possible that enabling trim could give an attacker insight into what blocks have/haven’t been used, but for me it’s just to make it harder for someone to get my data if I lose the laptop or it’s stolen.

Filesystem
First things first, the file system needs to support trim (ext4 does). If you’re using Fedora 18 you may have to edit your /etc/fstab and add the discard mount option to any partition you want to trim./dev/sda1 /boot ext4 defaults,discard 1 2

Under Fedora 19, my non-encrypted, non-lvm /boot partition works with fstrim out of the box (I didn’t have to set the discard mount option), so that’s good.

So, problem is that somewhere along the way the discard commands aren’t reaching the device.

I have filesystem, lvm, luks, block layers I guess and I know it’s not the first or the last, so that leaves lvm and luks. Thanks to this post, it was pretty easy to enable on the latter two.

LVM
I edited the /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file and enabled the issue_discards option:issue_discards = 1

LUKS
Now to ensure that discards are sent to my crypto layer by adding the allow-discards option to /etc/crypttabluks-blah-blah-blah UUID=blah-blah-blah none allow-discards

Note: Thanks to chesty for pointing out that on Debian and other distros the format of that file and discards option may be different. Check man crypttab for the right option, but it may be something like this:luks-blah-blah-blah UUID=blah-blah-blah none luks,discard

Initramfs
OK, so config files are in place, no as both of these configs are included in the initramfs, time to rebuild it:chris@localhost ~ $ sudo dracut --force

Note: For Fedora 18 I had to tell dracut to include the crypttab file, as per this bug report.chris@localhost ~ $ sudo dracut --force -I /etc/crypttab